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Our Fallen Chieftain 
William McKinley 




A SERMON 

BY 

Rev. F, L. Goodspeed, Ph.D., 

Minister of the First Church of Christ, 
Springfield, IVIassachusetts 



Preached on September 15th, 1901, the Day Succeeding the 

Death or President William McKinley. Delivered 

ALSO, IN Substance, at a Mass -Meeting in 

Westfield, Mass., on the Day or 

THE President's Burial 






For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill 

And break the shore, and evermore 

Make and break, and work their will ; 

Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll 

Round us, each with different powers. 

And other forms of life than ours. 

What know we greater than the soul ? 

On God and Godlike men we build our trust. 

Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's ears: 

The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears : 

The black earth yawns : the mortal disappears ; 

Ashes to ashes ; dust to dust ; 

He is gone who seemed so great, — 

Gone ; but nothing can bereave him 

Of the force he made his own 

Being here, and we believe him 

Something far advanced in State, 

And that he wears a truer crown 

Than any wreath that man can weave him. 

Speak no more of his renown, 

Lay your earthly fancies down. 

And in the vast cathedral leave him. 

God accept him, Christ receive him. 

— Tennyson^ on the Duke of Wellington. 



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OUR FALLEN CHIEFTAIN 
WILLIAM McKINLEY 

Matt. 25: 21. " His Lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful 
servant." 

Prov. 28 : 4. " They that forsake the law praise the wicked : but such 
as keep the law contend with them." 

^HE dastardly hand of the assassin has 
again sent to his grave a prince of our 
WZ.^ nation. Three times in one generation 
'■■^^ has a president of the United States 
been murdered in cold blood. For nearly 
a century our chief magistrates moved about in the 
midst of their fellow-citizens without danger or fear. 
But now it would seem that we must surround our 
presidents with all the safe-guards which constantly 
hedge a European king. 

Our sorrow is almost too great for utterance. We 
are all stunned by the blow which has fallen. We feel 
that it was aimed at us and our homes and our safety. 
The president was the embodiment of the nation, the 
incarnation of orderly government, the representative 
of law and of society founded on law. When the assassin 
fired his fatal bullet at the person of the president he 
aimed it at your heart and mine and at all the institu- 
tions for which the Republic stands. The nation was 
assaulted when he was stricken. The nation was 
wounded when he fell in mortal agony. In his death 
the nation is smitten in the very heart. 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



This is one of the dates which will ever punctuate 
our national history with its anguish at the baseness 
and blindness to which our humanity is subject. It is 
a date which humiliates humanity by revealing the 
depths of infamy to which it is possible for human 
nature to descend. It will also be a date which will 
glorify our humanity by revealing the heights of noble- 
ness and sympathy and tenderness to which a human 
soul may attain even under the stress and the agony 
of death. A deadly weapon may strike down a frail 
human life, but no weapon can strike down the influ- 
ence and the power of a fair true life upon the world. 

" Good deeds cannot die : 
They with the sun and moon renew their light, 
Forever blessing those who look on them." 

William McKinley stood in the forefront of our 
nation's life as the ablest and best beloved man among 
us. Simple and unpretending in manner, with a calm 
and poise which proved a spirit under perfect self- 
mastery, he seemed removed to a region above the 
baser passions, the petty ambitions and meaner im- 
pulses of smaller and weaker men. His occupancy of 
the presidential office has been a gradual and constant 
revelation of the real greatness and power of the man, 
until we had come to trust his clear judgment, his 
transparent honesty, his courage in the face of tremen- 
dous difficulties, his calmness under criticism and his 
patience under burdens and trials which would have 
crushed a smaller spirit to the ground. He had the 
lofty and serene sense of duty which characterized 
Washington, and the unswerving endurance under 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



resentment and jealousy which was the great mark of 
Lincoln's character. And together with them, a trinity 
of manhood of which America will be forever proud, 
he will pass into history. He guarded the freedom of 
all who came under the Stars and Stripes. Some men 
are good, but not great. Some men are great, 
and not good. But in my judgment he will be un- 
derstood as combining greatness of character with 
sanity and strength of intellect. He was not a 
brilliant genius panting for an opportunity to display 
himself, but his intellectual powers indicated sound 
sense, clear insight into questions of complicated bear- 
ings, and with an exquisite tact which never forsook 
him and which enabled him to decline a request and 
yet at the same time give the impression that he had 
conferred a favor. Absolutely transparent in motive, 
absolutely pure in personal character, absolutely tender 
and devoted in the family circle, we can truthfully 
describe him in the phrase Guizot used of Washington 
as one of the greatest of virtuous men and one of the 
most virtuous of great men. Although there was 
nothing theatrical about him, although no bolts flamed 
from him as though hurled from a storm-shaken and 
angry sky, his light was a steady flame, a great beacon. 
While Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander sought to 
keep the world in fear, he sought to estabUsh more 
firmly the brotherhood of man, the friendship of all 
sections, the comity of nations, and to guide his coun- 
try into channels of wider beneficence and higher 
civilization. In that most trying and responsible situ- 
ation created by the Spanish war he was wise, prudent, 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



patriotic, adverse to war, an earnest advocate of peace, 
acting always in a manner befitting the grandeur and 
dignity of our country, showing that statesmanship is 
not a lost art, gaining for our country the sympathy and 
respect of the whole civilized world. Five years ago 
he found us a provincial people bound^ up in our own 
interests and without authority in the councils of 
nations. To-day we are in the front rank of nations, 
our flag respected on every sea and our influence felt 
around the world. Unselfish, and steady as the pole- 
star, his dearest wish was to emancipate the tribes 
brought under our sway, to establish among them 
ordered liberty, to deliver them from misrule and 
violence, and dedicate them to a real and lasting free- 
dom. In moral, manly greatness he stood in moun- 
tainous majesty above the demagogue and the politician 
and the jingo, an imperial man representing civic 
devotion, compact patriotism, an enthusiasm for the 
happiness and well-being of all the people, — a genuine, 
splendid man, best type of American manhood, calling 
out to himself as he lies there in death to-day the 
affection, the admiration and the honor of the whole 
world. 

Born of the old Covenanter stock, President Mc- 
Kinley incarnated the spirit of Scotch integrity and 
courage. Born in comparative poverty, he worked his 
way up until at seventeen he was teaching a country 
school at twenty-five dollars a month and boarding 
around. When Fort Sumter was fired upon, he 
dropped the spelling-book and shouldered his musket, 
the first man among all his townsmen to offer himself 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



in his country's cause. As a soldier he soon won the 
admiration of his colonel, Rutherford B. Hayes, for his 
prompt and eager performance of his soldierly duties. 
He fought at South Mountain and took part in the 
awful struggle of Antietam. A boy of eighteen and a 
commissary sergeant in charge of supplies for his 
regiment, he determined to get food to his faint and 
weary comrades on the firing hue. "And then the 
boy," so goes the record, " without orders, compelled 
by no soldier's duty, loaded his wagons, called for 
volunteer drivers, and on from the rear to the front, 
through the shower of shot and shell, braving death 
every instant, brought to the front and to the fainting 
soldiers of his regiment the reinforcement of food and 
strength that enabled them to go on with the conflict 
to the end." He took a valiant part in the later battles 
of the war, always conspicuous for bravery and obedi- 
ence to the orders of his superior officers. The war 
over, he finds himself a major. He returns home and 
studies law, and into his chosen profession he pours 
the same enthusiasm, the same courage, the same 
lofty purpose. What he was as a soldier he is as a 
citizen. He is a Christian man, belting all his activi- 
ties back to the power of God, resting on the unseen 
and eternal verities. Undaunted by the difficulties 
which meet every young man, he rose step by step in 
his profession, grew in mental and moral stature and 
in the esteem and confidence of his fellowmen, went 
to Congress and then to the White House. We cannot 
follow minutely all the steps in his ascent, but all were 
characterized by the same steadfast honor and trans- 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



parent faithfulness to duty which we saw in his earlier 
and later life. There is little dramatic about it all. 
He was simply master of himself, made a straight path 
between purpose and fulfilment, improved the present 
hour, was unterrified by difficulties, undaunted by 
dangers, his ardor never chilled by suspicions, his 
confidence and trust reposed in men never soured by 
neglect or betrayal. He never lost faith either in God 
or in the people. Mind and heart and conscience in 
splendid symmetry and in harmony with a splendid 
will, were preparing him to be the trusted chieftain of 
his people, a man four-square to all the cardinal points 
of manhood, a character in which "the length and 
breadth and height were equal," a man of whom we 
may truthfully say as Tennyson said of another : 

" Rich in saving common sense, 
And as the greatest only are — 
In his simplicity sublime ; 
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour, 
Nor palter'd with Eternal God for power ; 
Who let the turbid streams of rumour flow 
Thro' either babbling world of high or low; 
Whose life was work, whose language rife 
With rugged maxims hewn from life ; 
Who never spake against a foe. 
Let his great example stand 
Colossal, seen in every land, 
Till in all lands, and through all human story, 
The path of duty is the way to glor>'." 

And now in the fullness of his powers, at the 
height of his influence, when he was becoming every 
day more trusted and more loved, he is wrenched from 
his glorious heritage of honor and of opportunity, he 
is laid low on a bed of anguish over which his mourn- 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



ing countrymen, and all honest men of every nation, 
and foreign kings and rulers have shed unfeigned 
tears. Stricken by a hand thrust out of the vilest 
scum of humanity, by an infamous assassin represent- 
ing the most wretched, unrestrained, and desperate of 
all devilish theories, he falls back with an unparalleled 
prayer for his murderer, "May God forgive him!" 
That was Christlike. That was the Christian spirit in 
its finest expression, in its utmost reach. For it was 
a most foul murder. Other assassins had approached 
and slain from behind. Lincoln and Garfield both fell 
by the hand of those who stole upon them unseen. 
But this man came in the hypocritical guise of friend- 
ship to murder with the hand outstretched to greet and 
welcome. How could he slay a man so noble, one who 
had never knowingly wronged him or any man, how 
could he meet the kindly glance of those wonderful 
eyes, with more than the treachery of a Brutus and 
with almost the perfidy of a Judas ? And the blow to 
be met with no scream of fear or reproaches from the 
victim, but with the courage of the soldier and the 
forgiveness of the Christian ! I say that if the assas- 
sin degrades humanity, then his illustrious victim 
glorifies humanity. 

" On either shore not hard to find 

The lofty aim, the Godlike speech, 
The dauntless heart ; but who shall reach 
Thy grand simplicity of mind." 

We may well thank God for such a man. We may 
well boast that he is ours. A land that can continue 
to rear such men need not despair of the future. If 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



we were enriched by his life and by his service, we 
were still more enriched by the spirit of fortitude and 
patient resignation in the hour of mortal agony. He 
died as he had lived, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 
All mankind have been made kin by this splendid 
example of heroism and Christian fortitude. The echo 
of the assassin's shot has awakened the sympathies of 
the world. 

If the illustrious victim was great in life, he was 
greater still in death, thinking not of himself, but of his 
poor invaUd wife, the object of his most tender solici- 
tude through many years. As his first thought, after 
the fatal shot, was for her, lest her frail system be 
overwhelmed by the stroke, so was his last conscious 
moment devoted to comforting her. For thirty years 
he had walked with her and been the object of her 
idolizing love. And through the long period, though 
engrossed with congressional cares, bearing the bur- 
dens of the governorship, and loaded with the great 
obligations involved by the presidency, never a day 
passed a portion of which was not sacredly devoted to 
that frail and gentle companion of his youth, who is 
today stricken, crushed, and wounded to the heart's 
core. The strong oak fallen, the vine also, which 
clung to it, lies prostrate. The world will never for- 
get his marvellous loyalty to his suffering wife. There 
are few more pathetic scenes in history than this dying 
man pouring his waning strength into the heart of the 
one he had loved and so tenderly cherished. Thus by 
a stainless life crowned by a heroic and unselfish death, 
did he set the seal to a grand example and pass from 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



the earthly burden to the heavenly crown. Thank God, 
we have to make no apology for his life. In honoring 
him we honor ourselves, and the spontaneous and over- 
whelming outburst of genuine sorrow on the part of all 
our people proves that the heart of the nation is still 
sound and true. Probably the death of no other man 
on earth could have so touched the heart of the world. 
What the surrender of cherished plans, what the baf- 
fling of his high ambitions, what the sundering of the 
sweet ties of friendship and of love cost him, who can 
tell ! Before him years of usefulness, the confidence of 
friends, the sweet society of a wife tenderly cherished 
through years of invalidism, the wife of his youth 
whose very life was bound up with his ! 

And yet this masterful man turns from it all in 
obedience to a higher summons, without a murmur, 
not fearing to tread the wine-press alone, and as a 
humble, untroubled soul, faced death with an unfalter- 
ing trust. With the same gracious and courteous man- 
ner he had ever shown, he took his leave of friends, 
'hearing above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's 
bullet the voice of God,' resigning himself with simple 
Christian trust to the divine decree and so passing 
to where beyond these voices there is rest and peace. 
Having lived with God and for God, when the 
inevitable moment came he required no minister to 
ask forgiveness or priest to make offering for the 
repose of his soul. His whole life had been a prepar- 
ation for death. He was already at peace. He had 
fought his good fight, and he had kept the faith. " Let 
us believe that in the silence of the receding world he 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore and 
felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the 
eternal morning." His name will be great in history 
and his example in both public and private life will be 
a beacon light to the young of future generations who 
will be guided by the ** counsel of his life and charac- 
ter and courage." It is the faith and the example of 
such as he that are bringing the new heaven and the 
new earth. Concerning him will come to pass his own 
fine words concerning Washington, when he said, 
" While strong with his own generation, he is stronger 
even in the judgment of the generations which shall 
follow. After a lapse of a century he is better appre- 
ciated, more perfectly understood, more thoroughly 
venerated and loved than when he lived. He remains 
an ever-increasing influence for good in every part of 
the sphere of action of the RepubUc. He is recognized 
as not only the most far-sighted statesman of his gen- 
eration, but as having had almost prophetic vision. 
He built not alone for his own time, but for the great 
future, and pointed the rightful solution of many of 
the problems which were to arise in the years to come." 
William McKinley is our third martyred president. 
I say " martyr " deliberately. He is the nation's 
costliest sacrifice. In a very real sense he died for 
us. In a very real sense he died because of us. We 
are all to blame for the spirit of lawlessness abroad 
in our land. It is a national vice, and you and I are 
the nation. In one of Bret Harte's clever parodies of 
the F'rench, he tells a story of three gamin who were 
playing in the streets of Paris. A priest passed by. 



Our Fall en Chieftain i^ 

" There goes a priest," cried one ; " look out for your 
eggs and your chickens ! " Then the priest, hearing 
the words, knelt down and prayed for the boys. But 
reflecting upon the incident, he became convinced 
that it was not the fault of the boys, but of their 
parents. So he knelt down and prayed for the parents. 
But on second thought he saw that it was not the 
fault of the parents, but of society, so he knelt and 
prayed for society. And, as he rose from his knees, 
he said to himself, "But, my friend, who is soci- 
ety ? You and I are society." So he knelt down 
the last time and prayed for himself. And, after all, 
that is the whole of the matter. You and I are soci- 
ety, and it is society that has hatched the unlikely 
brood whose representative has smitten to the death 
our beloved president. His death will not have been 
wholly in vain if, as one result of it, we have in this 
country a revival of the idea of the majesty and suprem- 
acy of law. John Bright 's remark about the value of 
agitation as " the marshalling of a nation's conscience 
to right its laws " was good ; but what is specially 
needed now is that agitation which shall result in the 
marshalling of the people's consciences for obedience 
to the laws, and for the honest, fearless and impartial 
enforcement of the laws. 

There is a spirit of lawlessness rampant in this 
country which, unless checked, will surely bring us to 
the dust. We see it in the acts of mob violence when 
enraged multitudes take the law into their own hands 
to murder the supposed criminal. You see it when 
labor unions take matters into their own hands to 



14 Our Fallen Chieftain 

enforce their own ideas, even by the use of force and 
violence and intimidation. If the laboring man takes 
the sword instead of the ballot, he will perish by the 
sword. We see it in the lynchings and burnings 
and torturings of negroes, without arrest by forms 
of law, without trial, without conviction or any pre- 
tence to the due course and form of justice. It is 
seen in the public, open and unblushing palliation of 
acts of lawlessness on the part of governors and 
others elected to enforce and defend the law. By 
them this lawlessness has been sometimes winked at, 
sometimes encouraged. We see it in the open, fla- 
grant, undisguised nullification of law by the liquor 
traffic throughout this nation. The licensed saloon is 
the nesting-place of anarchy. We see it in the brazen 
effrontery by which the brutes of the prize-ring are 
able to carry out their unlawful spectacles under the 
very eyes of men who are sworn to administer justice 
and maintain the law. It is seen in the widespread 
desecration of the Sabbath day. It is seen in the 
acts of public corporations which trample upon the 
rights of private citizens and use the public for their 
own pecuniary profit and advantage. We see it in the 
empty sensationalism and in the untempered, exagger- 
ated, and scandalous attacks upon public men by a 
yellow journalism, and in the bitter, cynical, and insid- 
ious taunts and gibes of a more respectable though no 
less dangerous portion of the press. It is seen in the 
debauching of legislators by means of bribes. It is 
seen in municipal misrule and in the reign of bossism 
in our great cities. It is seen in the nauseating sym- 



Our Fallen Chieftain 15 

pathy manifested for criminals, when silly women send 
fruits and flowers to the occupants of murderer's row. 
It is seen in the open and avowed teachings of red anar- 
chism, not merely from little insignificant newspapers, 
but by bloody speeches given by anarchists from pub- 
lic platforms, their threats now having culminated in 
the destruction of our president. We need a great 
revival of conscience ; we need less maudlin sympathy 
for the law-breaker and more respect for the Deca- 
logue. 

All defense of lynching is foolish and wicked. 
Anarchy can never cure anarchy. Moral madness 
must be met by swift but sober justice. If I had my 
way, every man and woman against whom the utter- 
ance of anarchistic sentiments could be proved 
should be put at hard labor for life. We might 
banish them from the country, but that would be 
unjust to the land to which we sent them. Let them 
spend their natural days in strenuous toil on behalf of 
the society they would destroy, and of the government 
whose laws they would nullify and banish. Let them 
be hunted down like wolves ; let them be ferreted out 
like rats ; let them be crushed like vipers. If I had my 
way, summary justice, stern and unrelenting, should 
be meted out to this wretch who has lifted his hand 
against all organized society. His punishment should 
be so swift and terrible as to teach all similar mon- 
sters the awfulness of their crime and the sure retri- 
bution which should follow. To-morrow morning he 
should be tried, and, before the set of to-morrow's sun, 
his miserable soul should be sent into the presence of 



i6 Our Fallen Chieftain 

his Creator, and his miserable dust buried from the 
sight of man, to pollute the air no longer. 

By the ablest and most careful statisticians crime 
is said to be increasing more rapidly than the popula- 
tion in this country. Theft and burglary and vaga- 
bondism and highway robbery and murder ! It cannot 
be because of hard times, for the times are good. The 
men who would do such deeds would not work if they 
had a chance. These criminals will not labor in the 
most thrifty times. The only toil they will ever do is 
when they are in the penitentiary, with the overseer 
threatening them with a protracted shower-bath or 
the straight-jacket. Let the law be enforced. Let 
the police become more vigilant and fearless. Let the 
gangs of loafers on the street corners and all unlawful 
assemblies be broken up. Let the courage of public 
officials be toned up. While we want in our country 
asylums for the support of the incompetent and the 
sick and the aged and the invalid and the insane, let 
voluntary idlers and the plotters against public peace 
and safety be compelled to work for the state. If they 
will not work for themselves, let them be made to work. 
We are told that Czolgosz was a consummate idler. 
"Idleness is the mother of crime," and the father, too. 
I am satisfied that for these men who agitate anarchism 
and threaten to rob and burn and destroy, nothing is 
so well adapted as work and, upon their refusal to 
work, the old-fashioned whipping -post. We must 
also raise the public ideal and tone up the public con- 
science. We must restrain the agitator as well as 
punish the act ; we must hold the teacher of anarchy 



Our Fallen Chieftain 17 

responsible for the conduct of his pupil. Most of the 
outlaws of society are perfectly satisfied with a lodg- 
ing in jail or a prison bunk, and there some of them 
recline through the long winter days and nights sup- 
ported by the self-respecting and hard-working tax- 
payers of our land. They are perfectly content that 
the government should pay their board and do their 
washing, while they rest from their hard and consum- 
ing toil of the summer tramp. Every patriot heart 
cannot but be oppressed with direful apprehensions 
on account of the utter contempt for law shown by 
certain elements of American society. 

" Oh Liberty, how many crimes are committed in 
thy name ! " Liberty is not hcense. Liberty is not the 
right of every man to do as he pleases. Government 
is not an artificial contrivance. Law is not an author- 
ity which one man assumes to exercise over another 
man. We are born into government when we are 
born into the world. We are born under a realm of 
laws and into a society where law is wrought into its 
very structure. Anarchy is modern diabolism. When 
every man is doing "that which is right in his own 
eyes," Satan is having his own way. Liberty under 
law developed a race of men before whom despots 
trembled, but license paralyzes the moral faculties to 
the eternal distinction between right and wrong. The 
Decalogue did not originate with Moses ; it was elab- 
orated out of the human frame and the human mind. 
Law is fundamental and constitutional, and he who 
renounces law not only denies the God who organized it 
into the nature of things and into the nature of man, 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



but denies himself and becomes an anomaly, a monster 
in the universe. Law is before all written expressions 
of it. It was the saintly Hooker who thus defined it : 
"Of law nothing other can be said than that her seat 
is in the bosom of God and her voice the harmony of 
the world." A man can never get away from law until 
he gets away from himself ; for law is not constraint 
from the outside, it is something born with him and 
within him. He is hedged about by physical and ma- 
terial and mental laws, and only by obedience to them 
has he made any progress in civilization. These laws 
a man may never defy. If he defies the law of logic, 
he belongs in the lunatic asylum. If he defies the 
law of mental processes, the law of the intellect, he 
belongs in the home for feeble-minded. If he defies 
the laws of the state, he belongs in the state prison. 
There are laws of mind, laws of art, laws covering the 
whole domain of man's mental and moral and material 
life. We are and must ever be bound about and bound 
together by social and economic laws. Defy the one, 
and you have anarchy. Defy the other, and you have 
commercial disaster. We are bound about also by the 
higher moral and spiritual laws, the laws that link us 
to the eternal and the infinite God. Those laws are 
written all over our nature and we can never defy or 
banish them. Those laws are stamped upon us and 
are interpreted by our conscience, and we can never 
disregard them without murdering conscience, without 
soul suicide. There are Biblical laws and there are 
reason's laws, and man has always been under law 
and always will be. "The only liberty," says Burke, 



Our Fallen Chieftain 19 

"that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; 
that not only exists along with order and virtue, but 
which cannot exist at all without them." "Freedom," 
says Professor Green, "is a liberation of the powers of 
all men equally for contributions to the common good." 
And Henry Ward Beecher declares, "The only liberty 
is the liberty to be unhindered in obeying natural 
laws." Liberty is therefore not the right of every 
man to do as he pleases ; it is the right of every man 
"to be unhindered in seeking the common good in a 
lawful and orderly manner." 

Have we not had warning enough, that three times 
in a generation we have seen a president assasinated .'' 
Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz — a trinity of infamy, of 
lawlessness, of murder, which has been equalled by no 
other nation in the same length of time! No other 
nation has been so humiliated by the murder of its 
high officers. When we ask with anxiety, "Are we 
growing better or worse.?" we may well listen to the 
conclusions of a keen observer of our civilization, who 
says : "The sun grows brighter. The world rever- 
ances our imperial aspirations as Americans, and 
beUeves on the whole that we mean justice to our 
entire population. One portion of our land is cer- 
tainly growing better, that which the churches and 
the schools and the Sabbaths are clearing of rubbish, 
plowing, irrigating, sowing and reaping, but there are 
jungles in civiUzation that grow neglected. There is 
a vast unchurched population among us. I think the 
people inside the churches, the Christian schools, and 
worthy households are growing better. I think the 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



unchurched, floating masses in this country are grow- 
ing worse. It becomes us to study both the sun with 
its resplendent, dazzling glory, and to thank God for 
all time to come for its glory in the heavens, but it 
becomes us also to study the blood-red bars of law- 
lessness, drawn in our recent history from side to side 
of the disc of civilization." 

It seems to me that reformation must come, if it 
comes at all, through the homes of the land. In those 
homes there must be a revival of reverence for all things 
sacred, for parental authority, for law, for public insti- 
tutions, for God. There is not the respect for parental 
authority that there was. A critic of American affairs 
has asserted that the Civil War was due largely to the 
fact that the young people of the South were not 
taught to obey their parents. The fifth Command- 
ment has been turned end for end, and is read at 
present, "Parents, obey your children." The art of 
reverence is wellnigh a lost art in America. Oliver 
Wendell Holmes said the apron-strings of the Ameri- 
can mother are made of india-rubber. But, if we 
may judge by the irreverent way in which parents are 
spoken of and treated by their offspring, today even 
that pliable, elastic apron-string has been severed, and 
parental authority has been lost. Young America is in 
the saddle. There is no theme too sacred, there is no 
personality too august, there is no institution too vener- 
able, there is no law too holy, not to be made the subject 
of jest or the butt of ridicule. Irreverance toward God 
and all sacred things is followed by disregard of paren- 
tal authority and restraints and all the bonds which bind 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



men to decency and right. Insubordination in the 
home means that the same spirit is carried into the 
school, until now the teachers are in despair over try- 
ing to fill minds already preempted by affairs which 
should engage the attention of those who are twenty- 
five instead of twelve. 

A scene came under my eye this summer which 
illustrates the temper of too many of the youth of our 
land and time. A man alighted from an electric car 
in the place where I was stopping. He had come 
from a neighboring city, and his son, a lad of ten or 
twelve summers, met him as he descended from the 
car and proceeded to examine his pockets to see if he 
had brougTit the regulation amount of sweetmeats, or 
whatever had been ordered. Upon his failure to find 
any, he drew back a step and with an angry face 
struck his father a vicious blow around the legs with 
a whip which he held in his hand. That father, cer- 
tainly, knew as well as old King Lear, 

" How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child." 

God meant it when He gave the Fifth Command- 
ment, and " when Greece and Rome began to breed 
up conceited, unruly sons, walking after their own 
heart's lusts ; when Greece produced vicious and per- 
fumed dandies such as Aristophanes pictures ; when 
Rome produced jewelled debauchees like Otho, and a 
matricide hke Nero — God, too, began to wipe out 
their glory as when one wipeth a dish, wiping it and 
turning it upside down." When the grand old honored 
title, " my father," is replaced by " the old man," or 



Our Fallen Chieftain 



"the governor," when children take all the love and 
toil of hard-working and ageing parents as though it 
were an offering due to their own transcendent import- 
ance and merited no return, when even children of 
seven years are confessed by their parents to be un- 
manageable, when infants omit childhood and leap 
with one bound from the nursery to the drawing-room, 
when the daughter, '• whose smattering of shallow 
accomplishments has led her to mistake herself for a 
lady, looks down on her mother from the whole height 
of her inferiority as a person to whom she can leave 
the domestic drudgery while she herself is reading 
sentimental romances or murdering vapid music on a 
cheap piano," we may well ask ourselves whether the 
heart of all that makes for reverence and home and 
obedient citizenship is not being eaten out by a gan- 
grene which will ultimately destroy the whole of the 
body politic. Our young people should be taught that 
" They that forsake the law praise the wicked ; but 
such as keep the law contend with them." 

The vipers that raise their heads against our gov- 
ernment to-day are mostly emigrants from the despot- 
isms of Europe. Our immigration laws must be made 
doubly strict and then enforced to the letter. Even 
if the doors were shut to-day, we have a tremendous 
undertaking to assimilate the elements in our midst. 
To let in more of the same sort is to endanger our 
Republic and run the serious risk of the same over- 
throw which destroyed Rome. For years Europe has 
been using the United States as a dumping-ground for 
her paupers and criminals. By an official investigation 



Our Fal len Chieftain 23 

under Secretary of the Treasury Foster, it was found 
that for years there had been a systematic movement 
in Europe to use America as a place of deposit for the 
dregs of European society, where nations across the 
sea might unload their criminals, idiots, paupers and 
diseased people. Everybody knows it, and while we 
have protection in many things, there is almost abso- 
lutely free trade in rascals and criminals of all sorts, 
which is breeding in our country moral pestilence and 
assassination. A man so ignorant or so bad that 
Europe does not want him is not good enough for 
America. At the gateway of this New World, wel- 
coming the millions who seek our shores and greeting 
the traveller on his journey back to the land he loves 
the best, "a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by 
night," stands the statue of Liberty Enlightening the 
World. Liberty enlightening the world, not license 
darkening and cursing the world ! Let that statue wel- 
come no murderous assassins. Let her torch of light 
be not turned into the blood-red torch of anarchy. 
Behind her symbolic form let no dastardly slayers of 
our pubhc men find a refuge and desecrate the emblem- 
atic figure by hurling thence the bomb, or firing thence 
the fatal shot to wound mankind in the consecrated 
name of freedom. Let her stand for ordered liberty, 
a warning as well as a welcome. 

And so, while we mourn, we must also plan for the 
defense of the things dearest to us. It is a great sac- 
rifice that has been made. God grant that it may 
atone for the sins of our nation ! It is for us to devote 
ourselves to the preservation and extension of those 



24 Our Fallen Chieftain 

great principles for which the Republic stands, pour- 
ing, if possible, a new meaning and sacredness into 
the words of our first great martyr President, and, 
applying them to our latest martyr, say, " It is for 
us, the living, rather to be dedicated to the unfin- 
ished work which he has thus so nobly advanced. It 
is for us to be here dedicated to the great task 
remaining before us, that from this honored dead we 
take increased devotion to that cause for which he 
gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here 
highly resolve that he shall not have died in vain ; that 
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of free- 
dom, and that government of the people, by the people, 
and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 
In a few days now will be repeated the sad procession 
so nobly described by Mr. Beecher while Lincoln's body 
was being borne to Illinois, and the description will fit 
the scenes through which will pass the sacred dust of 
our latest martyr President : " And now the martyr 
is moving in triumphant march, mightier than when 
alive. The nation rises up at every stage of his coming. 
Cities and states are his pall-bearers, and the cannon 
beats the hours with solemn progression. Dead — 
dead — dead — he yet speaketh. Is Washington dead .? 
Is Hampden dead .? Is David dead ? Is any man dead 
that ever was fit to live ? Disenthralled of the flesh, 
and risen to the unobstructed sphere where passion 
never comes, he begins his illimitable work. His life 
now is grafted upon the infinite, and will be fruitful 
as no earthly life can be. Pass on, thou who hast 
overcome! Your sorrows, O people, are his peace! 
Your bells and bands and mufifled drums sound 
triumph in his ear. Wail and weep here ; God makes 
it echo with joy and triumph there." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS" 




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